Do you ever notice that your Internet connection is different throughout the day or week? Do you download files and surf the Web faster later on at night, rather than earlier in the day? Have you ever called your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to tell them you’re offline or your connection is painfully slow, only to have it bounce back up to an acceptable level by the time you get off the phone? How do you keep tabs on your Internet connection speeds (for example, bandwidth?) I mean, especially, how do you do it without bringing pricey software in to do the job?

Well, this week’s download may be the answer to all those questions. It allows you to monitor your network’s bandwidth and monitor it over time, which enables it to give you a great amount of detail, concerning your Internet connection and the speeds it’s operating at.

BitMeter II is a bandwidth monitoring application that runs in the background, logging important and statistical data, regarding your network’s Internet connection speeds. It’s easy to use, yet its robust interface gives users exactly what they want and at a level they can handle. It’s nothing overly complicated or “out of the box,” but as you gain an understanding of the options available and what they do, you will start to make more and more of them work for you.

Here are some of the features you get with BitMeter II:

Audio notification at regular (configurable) time intervals. Different tones are played according to your current upload or download speed (tone boundaries are also configurable).

Audio notification each time a certain amount of data is transferred (uploaded, downloaded or both).

Animated System Tray icon shows upload and download speeds.

Check for new versions (with auto-check option and proxy support).

Select any combination of network cards to monitor or ignore.

Configurable graph scale. Set to any value or set to auto-adjust according to your speed.

Connection Speed Helper.

Option to display current graph maximum on screen.

Change units used in readout (Kb, KB, Mb, MB).

Change graph type (bar or line graph).

Interval bars with adjustable time period.

Adjustable scroll interval (anywhere between one and 60 seconds).

Save favorite color combinations for later use or use one of the preconfigured color schemes.

Configure System Tray tooltip information (including speeds and day totals).

Show or hide readout area or adjust its font size.

Auto-start option for current user or all users.

Manual and automatic backup options of configuration and traffic history information.

And that’s not all! BitMeter II even has a Web based interface, compliments of the integrated Web server that allows a user to log in via the Internet and view your connection speed remotely, with all the options one would have if you were sitting in front of the machine. (You can watch the demo here).

There is a built in Connection Speed calculator as well, which helps you calculate how long a potential download might take. How cool is that?!

BitMeter II also has a stopwatch, which can be configured to keep track of different things, such as your total online activity. Or, it can be filtered by certain criteria.

And of course, I would be remiss without describing the floating information window that gives you real time information at any moment just by hovering your mouse pointer over it.

You can log all your accumulated Internet data and it can be viewed in a number of different styles, including bar and line graphs. It even shows numerical data that can easily be imported by a spreadsheet program.

All of this and there is a great Help file too. It will walk you through and explain every single minute setting within BitMeter II and how to use it.

Note: BitMeter II does require version 1.1 or later of the Microsoft .NET Framework to be installed. This can be downloaded directly from the Microsoft Web site.

With security, extreme logging features, a Web interface and complete control over every aspect of the program and how it acts, this is the bandwidth monitoring application you have been searching for!